


throwing stones

by Hannah (hannahoftheinternet)



Series: the world's most powerful demigods [2]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Introspection, and being sad, lots of bianca angst and mild percy angst, nico practicing his powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-19 07:35:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22807552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hannahoftheinternet/pseuds/Hannah
Summary: Nico pauses while on the run to practice his powers, and runs into a bit of trouble.Set in the winter after The Battle of the Labyrinth.
Series: the world's most powerful demigods [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1547392
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	throwing stones

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoy part two of this series! Don't mind my setting it in Massachusetts; as a native Bay Stater, I feel honor-bound to represent my home.

I can withstand a lot more cold than most people, even most demigods—I assume it’s because Hell is cold—but I was shivering as the January sun sank below the horizon and twilight descended on Salem. My bare hands were almost purple with chill, even when I cupped them in the fabric of my shirt. I bit my cheeks to keep my teeth from chattering.

People brushed past me on the streets. No one stopped to ask me if I was okay, or where my parents were. Maybe the Mist was concealing me from their eyes, or maybe this was just an example of Massachusetts rudeness. Whatever it was, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be bothered.

My eyes landed on a few Greek letters written on the wall of an alleyway in glowing golden paint. Σωτηρια—Soteria, the goddess of safety. The universal symbol of a place safe for half-bloods. I ducked into the alleyway and banged my knees on a metal box. Grinding my teeth, I looked down at the chest. It was simple and geometric, like a Goodwill dropbox. I flipped it open and looked inside. Winter clothes, a medical kit, Ziploc bags of ambrosia and Thermoses of nectar. I grabbed a pair of knit gloves and pulled them over my hands. The moment the gloves left the box, another pair appeared. I stocked up on ambrosia, snagged a hat and some Band-Aids. Then I slammed the lid shut and backed up out of the alley.

There was a cemetery a couple blocks away, and I had a goal. I slipped through the streets, the people thinning out as darkness settled over the city. With every inch of dark cast over the roads and houses, I felt my power growing stronger. This was why I had adapted to a nocturnal lifestyle: I was twice as powerful as night than during the day. When the sun was down, I could keep shades in the world for hours. I could throw stones with my mind. I could move between cities without breaking a sweat (kind of—I was still working on that one). There was a quarter moon above my head, and I knew the sky would be moonless in a few nights. So much the better. My power was at its peak when there was no moon.

I had adopted this one grave as my home base in Salem. I only planned on staying there for a few days more, though. There’s only so much Taco Bell you can steal before you get caught, even if you’re invisible in shadows. I had already had a close escape from the cashier, and I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. I settled at the headstone of Molly Graves, which I had picked because the name made me smile my first real smile in weeks. I’d called her from the Underworld once, when I first arrived just after Christmas. There had been something unearthly about her, and it wasn’t the way she had eaten my offering of tacos silently.

“You’re a demigod,” I had said.

She had looked up at me. “I was.”

She was fresh with me, though, so I sent her back a few minutes later. I sat on her grave anyway. Maybe it was spite burning in my gut that drove me to it.  _ Ha ha, the son of Hades is using your grave dirt as a cushion. _ There was a skeleton buried a few feet from me, a snake. I brought it to the top of the earth and knit the bones back together. It slithered off into the trees beyond the cemetery. I knew it would fall apart again as soon as it left my aura, and sure enough, I dimly sensed the bones collapsing back into a pile a minute later. Turning my attention from it to the rocks and earth surrounding me, I focused and lifted a few pebbles into the air. They floated around my head, dipping and rising as my concentration was drawn by other things: rustling in the underbrush, cars driving past the cemetery.

Male voices, whispering but still completely audible in the night.

I went still, the stones dropping back to the ground as I focused every single scrap of attention I had on listening.

“Guys, guys, guys,” said one voice in a harsh whisper. “Over here.”

“Come on, man,” another groaned. “We’re going to get caught.”

A third voice swore at him to shut up, and all three started arguing, their voices getting louder and louder until I was sure that the entire city of Salem could hear them. They were drunk; that much was obvious. Drunk in a cemetery. They were close to me, and their voices started to grate on my nerves. I relaxed my shoulders—which was hard—and disappeared into the shadows so that they wouldn’t see me. Cautiously, I crept closer until I was right next to them. They were standing in front of a headstone, arguing loudly. One of them rolled his eyes and ordered the others to turn around. I heard him unzip his jeans.

My anger boiled over.

The ground trembled as I did, my rage surging through my veins. The carelessness, the  _ disrespect _ . I felt it like it was a brand on my skin, a searing iron of rage. The protection of the dead—this was my father’s territory,  _ my _ territory. My fury radiated, stones rising into the air almost of their own accord. It barely took a thought from me, barely a twitch of my fingers before the rocks hurled themselves at the boys. They struck home, bruising force through their jackets and jeans. The one who had been unzipping himself yelped in shock and jerked away. One of the others shrieked, an undignified sound that sounded more feline than human. All three of them scrambled away, jumping over the low fence that surrounded the cemetery, still being pelted by pebbles.

I let the shadows around me drop away, revealing myself to the world again. My energy had been completely drained away by the dual use of my powers: throwing stones and concealing myself. I sat back down on the cold earth with a thud, rubbing my temples. The world had started to swim before my eyes, the shadowy lines of the graveyard growing more and more indistinct the longer I kept my eyes open. I felt woozy and fuzzy, like my brain had been wrapped in cotton. When I opened my mouth to say something, I yawned instead, and then my eyes closed and I was asleep.

I woke up in the middle of the day, slumped against Molly Graves’s tombstone in a patch of withered grass. My mouth tasted disgusting—the product of eating Mexican fast food and then falling asleep without brushing my teeth, I guessed. Groaning, I dragged myself to my feet, unable to feel my nose. My gloves hadn’t protected my fingers, either, and I breathed into the fabric in an effort to keep them warm. I remembered the time I had blown up on Percy, bringing flames to life as a side effect of my anger and fear. I waited for the thought of Percy to make me scowl, like it usually did, but anger or irritation weren’t what I was feeling. It might have been sadness. Whatever it was, it didn’t produce any fire.

I left the graveyard by way of the very stealthy method of walking through the front gates. There weren’t many people around, just an older man and woman walking a tiny dog. They stared at my dirty clothes and sour expression. The dog growled at me. I glared at all three of them until they kept moving. There was a diner up ahead, and the windows were frosty and clouded with steam. After a few moments of deliberation—my innate dislike of being around people warring with the promise of food and warmth—I opened the door to the diner. The bell jangled happily, and the hostess looked up from her book. Her face fell rapidly as she took in my appearance.

“Hi!” she said, in a cheerful voice that didn’t match her face at all.

“Table for one, please,” I said.

The hostess didn’t look convinced. “What about your parents?”

I stared at her, unimpressed. She gave me a menu and a table in the corner. I had been right; it was very warm in the diner, uncomfortably warm, but I was still shivering, so I kept my jacket on. The menu had bright, happy designs all over it, and the dishes all had cutesy names. It was something my younger self would have loved.

Like a dream, I looked up and saw myself across the table, eight years old and smiling, pointing out things on the laminated menu to Bianca. When I tried to look harder at her, her face was indistinct, blurry, like it had been the last time I saw her. When she told me to forgive Percy.

My gut twisted again as I looked away, the images of better times evaporating like mist. The waitress had arrived wondering in a falsely happy voice if I wanted anything to drink. I wanted something warm, so I could wrap my hands around the cup and try to get some heat back into my skin. I also wanted something sweet, for reasons I couldn’t explain. I ordered a hot chocolate and a small basket of fries, which was about all I could afford with the meager collection of bills and coins in my jacket pocket. My dad is the god of riches, but apparently that does not translate to giving me unimaginable wealth.

My fries and hot chocolate came quickly. The diner was full but not busy; most of the patrons were apparently taking their time, not eager to go out into the sub-zero weather. The hot chocolate burned my tongue, but I didn’t care. It was the best thing I’d tasted in a long time. The fries were good too—some of them were a little raw in the middle, but I wasn’t in a position to complain. I covered them with ketchup and devoured them, suddenly shocked by how hungry I was. It wasn’t like I didn’t eat.

My bill came to seven dollars and two cents, which was great, because I had eight dollars and forty-seven cents in my pocket. The waitress told me to have a nice day, and the combination of food and warmth had improved my mood enough so that I wished her the same. She gave me a funny little smile, like:  _ look at this weird kid _ .

The walk back to the little house I had claimed as my home was miserable. It had started snowing while I was eating my fries, and I was walking against the wind, so I barely made any progress at all. I kept my eyes open for a dark corner where I could duck in and shadow travel, instead of moving about a foot every two minutes, but everything was white as far as the eye could see—heavy snow filling every crevice. I pulled the hood of my jacket up over my head and hunched my shoulders before remembering that I had taken a hat from the magic box and yanking that over my ears. It was too cold even for me.

When I finally got “home”, the old woman whose guest room I was occupying let me in with some unintelligible cooing. She barely had any teeth, and she was almost completely deaf, but she had also been nice enough to let an eleven-year-old kid who barely spoke or ate stay with her. I guessed I was a good housemate. And then I realized: I wouldn’t be eleven for much longer. It was January twenty-seventh. The next day was my birthday. The second birthday I would spend without Bianca. I didn’t try to communicate this to my host; she would only do something ridiculous like bake me a cake or knit me a scarf. I didn’t want anything like that. In fact, I wished I hadn’t remembered about my birthday at all.

I excused myself and went up the stairs to my temporary bedroom. There was nothing in it aside from my black duffel bag that I had stolen and stuffed with clothes. I shoved my ambrosia and my Band-Aids into it, and sat down on my bed. I wanted to go. I wanted to leave Salem forever.

**Author's Note:**

> Stay tuned for part three, which will finally see some interaction between the two boys! Remember, comments are a writer's best friend.


End file.
